> On Sep 26, 2016, at 5:25 PM, Paul Vixie <[email protected]> wrote: > > let's boost our outreach to repackagers, find out what they need, and provide > it. there's a win+win in here somewhere.
What stuns me is how people can write thousands of lines of perl to format documentation, with the justification that learning troff is too hard :-P In 1986 I dropped a UNIX box and a bunch of terminals into a court reporting business. Within two months – without any teaching – the supposedly computer illiterate reporters were writing their own macro packages to typeset court reports in a format they knew would work much better for the judges and lawyers, versus anything I had cooked up. troff's syntax does look a bit like line noise. But what do you expect from something that tries to stay the hell out of the way of the text it's trying to set. It is the most consistently regular language I have ever met. And anyone who discounts it for being opaque or obtuse is just outing themselves as someone who has never bothered to read the troff user manual. Osanna was a genius, far ahead of everyone else's time. --lyndon _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
